Dave K.'s Blog, page 5

just the right ticket for a cold

Good grief, how do I keep neglecting this thing? Oh, right. Laziness. And pride, to a certain degree. I mean, I know I'm supposed to be hanging my life over the balcony for all to see, but do you all REALLY need to know how often I sit around the apartment, eating onion dip out of the container with my fingers? Frankly, once is too often for that, but here I am.

But in any case, I just found out that the Chicago Center of Literature and Photography (aka CCLaP) is putting together a serialized...

the space and quiet that idleness provides

Working on a short story today, and it's similar in tone to one that I published in You People Disgust Me. I'm posting that little story here, just because.

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Once upon a time, a statue loved a painting.

The statue lived in the Native Folk Art exhibit next to fertility totems and beaded canoes and hand-carved miniature villages. The card next to him said that he was South African. He'd been carved from a single block of wood, just like Michaelangelo had chiseled David from a single piece...

the horrors which where written of him

So the literary parts of the Internet are all up in arms about Jacob Silverman's Slate article condemning the "epidemic of niceness" in online book culture, and Roxane Gay's response in Salon, in which she says Silverman is totally full of shit .

Feel free to read both articles and come to your own conclusions, but I'm siding with Roxane because, let's face it, the idea that the Internet is too nice is so demonstrably wrong that it almost doesn't need a response. I mean, really. The Intern...

something is taking shape

Thought I'd report in to report that there's not much to report. The novel is slow-going. I keep doing that thing where I start exploring an idea and then immediately second-guess it until I lose interest. It's probably a symptom of depression, which I've had periodic bouts with since I was a kid, but it's also part of the writing process, and easily the part I hate the most.

In her interview over at Cobalt , Jane Delury mentions a chemical that women secrete during childbirth that dulls memory...

do my job if i had some disease

Wow, I've been gone a while. Like, almost a month.

Well, I can explain that. I took an extended Vermont vacation after the Fourth of July to recharge my batteries and hang out with some friends in a part of the country that isn't a disgusting swamp come summertime. Been working on the new novel a bit, but not as much as I'd like, and I've also been reading a lot, mostly one of George Fraser's Flashman novels and Heinrich Boll's The Clown.

By the time I got back from Vermont, it was just about...

largely unquantifiable in business terms

Baltimore got rocked by a pretty brutal storm last night - to quote a friend of mine, the aftermath looked like "the giant Monty Python foot had stepped on my city." That's pretty much it. My car was thankfully not crushed by falling trees or their limbs, but it is completely blocked in by storm debris and a downed power line. Of course, the last time I saw my car was around 7:45am, so it could have been crushed into a cube by the elements by now.


Which is a long way of saying that I'm in UB's...

an evanescent sense of grandiosity

First things first, I picked up my diploma from UB earlier today. I'm officially a Master of Fine Arts! Yay! Not that it really does me any good career-wise, but yay! I still feel accomplished.

Second, I reviewed Deviant, a novel by my buddy and fellow UB alum Austin Wall, over at jmww . Austin managed to finish that and his short story collection thesis in the same semester, which just boggles my mind. I mean, I don't even put on pants unless I absolutely have to leave my apartment, so Austin'...

returned to life in a crumbling body

Geez, it's been two weeks since my last update. That's not good. And I actually have some stuff to talk about, even.

Firstly, the response to stone a pig has been great so far - the opening story from the book has been published in Cobalt (look for the link in my Published Works sidebar), and I'm going to be a guest on EMP Collective's Late Night Talk Show this Saturday. I guess I'll be talking about my book and maybe some telegrams, which is a good enough excuse to bust out the black suit and...

parallel to one coordinate plane

From Michael Bourne's April 30 essay on The Millions about what the death of newspapers means for writers : "I fear we are creating a generation of riff artists, who see their job not as creating wholly new original projects but as commenting upon cultural artifacts that already exist."

Yep. I worry about that too, and about whether or not I've taken on too much of the generic MFA writing style, defined by Bourne as an "insular, navel-gazing style that has more to do with a response to pr...

identify compelling stories and showcase them

A recent Urbanite article about the Baltimore media ignoring Baltimore's literary scene is pinballing its way around social media, and for good reason - the stereotype that Baltimore newspapers are run by petulant wannabe New Yorkers might very well be wrong, but it sure is easy to bring up in this context.

What pricked my ears up, though, was not the generic advice about writers needing to "put their stuff out there" (even if there's no designated "out there" to put their work into) or the co...